Family leave policies, though limited in scope and typically unpaid in the U.S., have hamstrung the progress toward gender wage parity since the 1990s, according to an economic paper.
The policies, led by the federal Family and Medical Leave Act enacted in 1993 and other state-based programs, account for 94% of the stalling out of steady improvement that had taken place in the two preceding decades, according to economists Peter Blair, of Harvard University, and Benjamin Posmanick of St. Bonaventure University.
“During the 1980s, the wage gap between White women and White men in the U.S. declined by approximately 1 percentage point per year,” Blair and Posmanick wrote in the paper, distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. “In the decades since, the rate of gender wage convergence has stalled to less than one-third of its previous value.”
